speed-reading

Speed-reading is the purported ability to read as many as 10,000 to
25,000 words a minute. For example, Howard
Berg claims to be able to read 25,000 words a minute by reading
"15 lines at a time backwards and forwards." That's about 80-90
pages a minute. Tolstoy's War and Peace should take Berg about 15
minutes to read.

George
Stancliffe claims he has taught a woman with a reading disability to
read 18,000 words a minute. Such a feat, he says, is common in children,
but rare in adults.*

Anne Cunningham, a University of California at Berkeley
education professor and an expert on reading, reports that tests measuring
saccades (small rapid jerky movement of the eye as it jumps from fixation
on one point to another) while reading have determined that the maximum
number of words a person can accurately read is about 300 a minute.
"People who purport to read 10,000 words a minute are doing what we
call skimming," she said. Speed in reading is mainly determined by
how fast a reader can understand the words and expressions one is reading.
The fastest readers are those with excellent "recognition
vocabularies." Faster readers can see words and understand them
faster than slower readers. To improve one's speed at reading, she says,
one should work on comprehension and study strategies (Robertson).

Others
claim that "the average college student reads between 250 and 350
words per minute on fiction and non-technical materials" and that a
"good" reading speed is 500-700 words per minute.*
It does seem intuitively true that one could speed up one's reading by (a)
spending less time between eye movements; (b) taking in more words with
each fixation; and (c) always moving forward, rather than skipping back to
re-read something. Having a good recognition vocabulary would certainly
speed these processes up. Conscious practice at improving one's speed
should also help.

Berg has repackaged the Evelyn
Wood Reading Dynamics course, one popular several decades ago with
people like John F. Kennedy. A reporter who attended one of Berg's classes
noted that in his five-hour course, Berg hadn't said much about comprehension,
except to suggest that it would come with practice. This did not deter
several of the 35 students, who had paid $51 each for the class from the
Learning Exchange in Sacramento, from purchasing audio tapes for $65
(Robertson).

Those desiring to increase the speed of their reading would
do better to enroll in a
community college course devoted to building study skills, vocabulary, and
reading comprehension. It would cost them less, and they would not
end up wasting their time trying to read 10 lines at a time, backward and
forward. They would also avoid the frustration that will be inevitable
when they find that while they can skim through material at a greater rate
than they can read it, the utility of such a skill is limited (good for
most of what's likely to be in the daily newspaper, for example, but not
for studying physics or reading a good novel). Skimming makes both
comprehension and taking pleasure in words or ideas next to impossible.
Why read fiction at all if you don't want to enjoy the language and the
ideas? Who would want to hire a physician or lawyer who skimmed rather
than read his or her texts?

*There seems to be only one person
who can read at such speeds with near-perfect comprehension. His name is
Kim
Peek and he has the ability to read two pages simultaneously, one with
each eye, with 98% retention. Nobody knows how he does it but he was born
without a corpus callosum, that bundle of nerves that connects the right
and left hemispheres of the brain. However, others have also been born
with no corpus callosum, or have had it surgically disconnected, without
resulting in an increase in reading or retention abilities. Kim can recall
most of the contents of some 7,600 books. But, since nobody knows how Kim
Peek does it, nobody can teach this skill to others.

Kim Peek was
partly the model for Raymond, the idiot savant in the movie Rain
Man.

Peter Roesler, computer scientist, member of the German Skeptics (GWUP), and chairman of the German Society for Speed Reading (www.dgfsl.de) believes he knows how Kim Peek did it. Roesler's work has not been published, but he claims:

....we have good (unpublished) theories how reading speeds of 2,000 or 3,000 words per minute can be explained. (There are only powerpoint slides in German, which show our thoughts on this phenomenon: www.schnell-leser.de/Schnelllesen_24.04.2008.ppt)

I don't read German, but maybe some readers do and will find Roesler's work of interest. It apparently builds on work done in the 1980s by Prof. Bruce L. Brown of Brigham Young University, and his group: Brown et al. (1981) "An Analysis of the Rapid Reading Controversy," in J. R. Edwards (Ed.), The Social Psychology of Reading. Language and Literacy Monograph Series. Silver Spring: Institute of Modern Languages; and Cranney et al. (1982) "Rate and reading dynamics reconsidered," Journal of Reading , 25(6), 526-533. Several people were found who could read at well beyond the 600-900 words per minute threshold with good comprehension.

We look forward to the publication of the study done by Roesler's group and hope it will be available in English for those of us who can't read German.

newSpeed reading: Reading between the lies by Michael Schmitz (auf Deutsch) "This article provides you with a review of the arguments used by salesmen when peddling their courses. And it will show you how the salesmen prepare and play their audience to avoid unhappy customers (and keep the money).

Reading this article will ensure that you will not be ripped off and allows you to educate other people about the tall claims and cheap lies of speed reading salesmen."[/new]